SOURCE: Peterson, Linda H. “Harriet Martineau's Household Education: Revising the Feminine Tradition.” Bucknell Review 34, no. 2 (1990): 183-94.

[In the following essay, Peterson suggests that Martineau's Household Education is an important radical work for its dismissal of differences in the educational needs of girls and boys, and for its suggestion that male-dominated public schools are unnecessary and that education is best done at home, giving girls increased opportunity to be instructed and women increased opportunity to instruct.]

Beginning in 1846, Harriet Martineau published two series of articles in a short-lived magazine called The People's Journal: one on travel called “Lake and Mountain Holidays,” another on education under such unlikely titles as “The Natural Possessions of Man,” “How to Expect,” and “The Golden Mean.”¹ Though The People's Journal (like many another radical scheme) soon failed, its editor John Saunders encouraged Martineau to finish her series on education, which she did in 1848, bringing out the next year a volume called Household Education. In its day, Household Education attracted much attention: Martineau wrote to Fanny Wedgwood about its popularity among “the Workies” and about the laudatory reviews it received in the British press.² Both in Britain and America the volume was reprinted again and again and gave a rise to Harriet Martineau's reputation, not to say her bank account.

In our day, Household Education has excited little interest among Victorian scholars or educational theorists: Vera Wheatley gives it less than a page in her biography of Martineau, smiling at the “quite unwitting humor, and … pedantic mode of writing”; Gillian Thomas dismisses it as educational theory, though she finds it interesting as a “dress rehearsal for the more systematic personal reminiscence of the Autobiography”; only R. K. Webb devotes some serious attention to the volume, especially to its expression of Martineau's radicalism and her “pseudo-scientific enthusiasms,” including that love of “cleanliness and temperance,” which were the “very religion of the materialist.”³ Martineau's Household Education is worth pursuing, however, as more than a nascent autobiography or an expression of pseudo-scientific obsessions. It is, as Webb points out, a radical document—radical in matters of religion, radical on issues of social rank. It is most radical, I believe, in its assumption of a feminist position on education and in its shrewd revision of an English feminine tradition of didactic writing on the subject of “female education.”⁴ Specifically, Martineau intends in Household Education to revise Hannah More's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), a treatise that was a seminal influence on her thought and which dominated notions about women's education in the first half of the nineteenth century. By engaging More's ideas, Martineau enters that larger Victorian debate about women's intellectual capacities and social roles.

Martineau's literary relationship with Hannah More was a long and agonistic one. The Reverend Lant Carpenter, a Unitarian preacher and teacher under whose spell Martineau fell in adolescence, introduced her to More—not merely as a devotional guide but as a literary figure against which a woman writer might measure herself. In his own Principles of Education, Carpenter wrote:

If any female writer should [hereafter] come forward to the public, possessing the clearness, simplicity, correctness, and well-stored understanding of an Edgeworth, the brilliant yet chaste imagination and “devotional taste” of a Barbauld, and the energy and high-toned and moral principle of a More, divested of bigotry, and founded upon genuine Christian theology, in the scale of utility she will probably stand unrivalled among her contemporaries. …⁵

That was a challenge to young Martineau: “to stand unrivalled among her contemporaries.” As we know from a private memorandum, she vowed to become “a forceful and elegant writer on religious and moral subjects, so as to be useful to refined as well as unenlightened minds.”⁶ In fact, the female writers Carpenter praised provided the impetus for Martineau's career as a journalist. In 1822, as a girl of nineteen, Martineau sent to the Monthly Repository three articles surveying the intellectual and literary achievements of women: the first two, “Female Writers of Practical Divinity,” covered Mrs. More, Mrs. Barbauld, and Elizabeth Smith; the third was titled simply “On Female Education,” though from internal evidence it seems to be a review—and critique—of More's Strictures on Female Education.

This early review suggests that, however much she may have admired More, Martineau viewed her as a dragon at the gate, an obstacle to her own aspirations as a writer and, more generally, to women who aspired to achievements beyond the domestic sphere. Even in 1822, as a novice thinker and writer, Martineau challenges More's statements about women's capacities and revises her notions about female education. Martineau argues against three assumptions, all implicit in More, all common in nineteenth-century thinking, that hinder improvements in women's education: (1) that if women pursue knowledge, they will “neglect their appropriate duties and peculiar employments”; (2) “that the greatest advances that the female mind can make in knowledge, must still fall far short of the attainment of the other sex”; (3) that women are naturally so vain that “any degree of proficiency in knowledge” will make them forget “the subordinate station assigned them by law, natural and divine.”⁷

Martineau's inclusion of the third issue gives away her hidden target in More's Strictures on Female Education, and not-so-hidden desire to counteract what she read there. More had included a long section on “The practical use of female knowledge, with a sketch of the female character, and a comparative view of the sexes,” which emphasized (among other things) women's vanity and particularly the vanity of pretentious young girls who spend their time scribbling and aspiring to public authorship: “it will generally be found true,” More suggests,

that girls who take to scribble, are the least studious, the least reflecting, and the least rational. They early acquire a false confidence in their own unassisted powers: it becomes more gratifying to their natural vanity to be always pouring out their minds on paper, than to be drawing into them fresh ideas from richer sources.⁸

These were hard words for a young woman who felt herself committed to authorship. In 1822, Martineau counteracts them by referring to principles of Christian humility that genuine education will inculcate and then, more shrewdly, by pointing out that if all women were better educated, none would have cause for vanity. “As the spread of information extend[s],” she argues, “there [will be] less cause for conceit.”⁹

But the other two objections—that women lack the mental capacities of men and that their appropriate sphere is essentially different from men's—were more difficult to counter and would engage Martineau's attention throughout her career. In “On Female Education,” she either skirts the issues or acquiesces in patriarchal notions about women's place. On the issue of women's mental capacities, she allows “that the acquirements of women can seldom equal those of men, and it is not desirable that they should”; she only wishes women “to be companions to men, instead of playthings or servants, one of which an ignorant woman commonly must be” (80). On the issue of women's proper sphere, she responds that women need education to carry out their designated duties, whether within the household or in “the wide field of charity” (78). In Household Education, however, written twenty-five years later and fifty years after More published Strictures on Female Education, Martineau takes up the issues of women's capacities and responsibilities more radically.

Overall, Household Education revises More's Strictures on a number of key points—not the least of which are religion and social rank. Whereas More proceeded strictly from Christian principles, it being her concern that modern prose literature had become far too secular, Martineau intended Household Education, as she later told a publisher, for “the Secularist order of parents”; if there was religion at all in it, it was the religion of the materialist—all cleanliness and temperance and self-control.¹⁰ On matters of social rank, More and Martineau differed, too. Whereas More's Strictures addressed only women of the “higher class,” those of “rank and fortune,” as her subtitle puts it, Martineau aimed at the middle ranks, specifically the secure artisanal class that was sufficiently above poverty so as not to worry about everyday necessities, but sufficiently below inherited wealth so as to need both book learning and practical experience. The child of royalty, Household Education claims, can never be a truly educated man, never “approach to our idea of a perfect man, with an intellect fully exercised, affections thoroughly disciplined, and every faculty educated by those influences which arise only from equal intercourse with men at large.”¹¹ Only those of the middle ranks can hope for such a liberal education.

Clearly, the shift from More's upper ranks to Martineau's middling sort shows a radical thinker at work, one who rejects rank as not only injurious to others, but injurious to the person him or herself. Even more radically, Household Education takes up a feminist position on women's abilities. Martineau is not to be persuaded that women's minds are different from men's—either in kind or degree. More had written that women's minds—like their bodies, because of their bodies—were inferior to men's: “Both in composition and action, they [women] excel in details; but they do not so much generalize their ideas as men, nor do their minds seize a great subject with so large a grasp”:

In summing up the evidence … of the different capacities of the sexes, one may venture, perhaps, to assert, that women have equal parts, but are inferior in wholeness of mind, in the integral understanding: that though a superior woman may possess single faculties in equal perfection, yet there is commonly a juster proportion in the mind of a superior man: that if women have in an equal degree the faculty of fancy which creates images, and the faculty of memory which collects and stores ideas, they seem not to possess in equal measure the faculty of comparing, combining, analysing, and separating these ideas; that deep and patient thinking which goes to the bottom of a subject; nor that power of arrangement which knows how to link a thousand connected ideas in one dependant [sic] train, without losing sight of the original idea out of which the rest grow, and on which they all hang. The female, too, wanting steadiness in her intellectual pursuits, is perpetually turned aside by her characteristic tastes and feelings.

[More 1:367]

More's description of women's inferiority may derive from Hartleian associationist psychology, or it may, more broadly, represent late eighteenth- and much nineteenth-century “scientific” thinking about the correlation between brain size and intellectual capacity. As Stephen Jay Gould reminds us, anthropometry—and, more specifically, craniometry—were fashionable fields in the nineteenth century, and the data the body-and-brain measurers gathered were often used to demonstrate the intellectual inferiority of women. Little body, little brain, little intelligence. According to Paul Broca, greatest craniometrist of them all, “the relatively small size of the female brain depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority” (by which he meant the degenerative effect of centuries of underusage, due to the passive mental lives women lived).¹²

For all her pseudoscientific enthusiasms, Martineau shows no interest in craniometry or in any other system that links intellectual capacity to physical size. Household Education asserts the general principle that the aim of education should be “to bring out and strengthen and exercise all the powers given to every human being” (13), and it acknowledges no differences between the “powers” of the two sexes. Examples featuring both boys and girls illustrate the chapters on the development of the powers (will, hope, fear, patience, love, veneration, truthfulness, conscientiousness). Anecdotes using men and women, boys and girls, serve to make points in later sections on intellectual training (the perspective, conceptive, reasoning, and imaginative faculties) and on the development of good habits. Indeed, throughout the volume, Martineau uses the now-approved feminist technique of alternating masculine and feminine nouns and pronouns: a boy this, a girl that; she this, he that.¹³

What is most striking about Household Education, however, is its tacit assumption that one need not write different childrearing manuals or different educational theories about boys and girls—as More had done, as Rousseau had done, as Martineau's American contemporary Catharine Beecher chose to do.¹⁴ Only when Martineau reaches chapter 21 (on the “reasoning faculties”) does she treat the presumed differences—and then she dismisses them:

I must declare that on no subject is more nonsense talked, (as it seems to me,) than on that of female education, when restriction is advocated. In works otherwise really good we find it taken for granted that girls are not to learn the dead languages and mathematics, because they are not to exercise professions where these attainments are wanted; and a little further on we find it said that the chief reason for boys and young men studying these things is to improve the quality of their minds. I suppose none of us will doubt that everything possible should be done to improve the quality of the mind of every human being.—If it is said that the female brain is incapable of studies of an abstract nature,—that is not true: for there are many instances of women who have been good mathematicians, and good classical scholars. The plea is indeed nonsense on the face of it; for the brain which will learn French will learn Greek; the brain which enjoys arithmetic is capable of mathematics.

[HE, 155-56]

Continuing in this vein for two pages, in a series of logical deductions that sweep away all objections to women's acquisition of a “male” education, Martineau reasserts her initial principle: that “everything possible should be done to improve the quality of the mind of every human being,” that “every human being is to be made as perfect as possible” (HE, 159).

In claiming that Martineau is “feminist” in her assertion of women's intellectual capacities and her advocacy of women's rights to equal education, I mean to suggest that she represents an early phase of the nineteenth-century “protest against [patriarchal] standards and values, and advocacy of minority rights and values.”¹⁵ Like Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Martineau insists that the best educational system is one in which both sexes are educated together first in the family, then in day schools.¹⁶ But Martineau's literary mode is not Wollstonecraftian, not what we usually associate with feminist protest and confrontation. In literary form and rhetorical style, Household Education inclines toward a masculine tradition of prose writing (though Martineau would have considered it universal). In form Martineau's work imitates neither Wollstonecraft's Vindication nor More's Strictures, but Carpenter's more general (and genderless) Principles of Education. Like Carpenter, Martineau handles issues of education under the broad classifications of “Intellectual, Moral, and Physical”; like Carpenter, she tends to minimize (or ignore) differences between the sexes. Moreover, Martineau's rhetorical style in Household Education, as in virtually all of her writing, is masculine—or, at least, is the product of what she considered a masculine education. In her chapter on the “reasoning faculties,” she tells the story of her training in composition, a story she uses to illustrate the rational capacities of women. Martineau learned composition from a boy's schoolmaster: a Presbyterian who turned Unitarian, lost his congregation and his pupils, and had it made up to him by local Unitarians who sent their daughters to his school. As one of those daughters, Harriet received a typical middle-class boy's education. She was trained in the conventions of masculine rhetoric, “taught the parts of a theme, as our master and many others approved and practised them”: “the Proposition, the Reason, the Example, the Confirmation, and the Conclusion” (HE, 154). Martineau used this masculine rhetoric throughout her life in her journalism, as in Household Education. Her feminism in this book is thus a feminism based as much on a demonstration of a woman's achievements in a male literary style as it is on arguments for women's education in traditionally male subjects.

Yet if Household Education is “feminist” in its rhetoric and its position on formal education, it is “feminine” in its alignment with another didactic tradition, with treatises like More's that treat specifically the question of woman's sphere. Martineau was proud of her accomplishments in housewifery—quick to point out that she could make her living by the needle as well as the pen; quick to argue that the brightest women were the best housekeepers, the dumbest the worst; quick to ridicule pretentious bourgeois families who sent their daughters to finishing schools but gave them no “thorough practice in domestic occupations” (HE, 198). Indeed, Household Education assumes that certain occupations (like sewing and cooking) are “natural” to women, that girls have a “natural desire and the natural facility for housewifery” (199). The illustrations in the chapters on “habits” show little boys doing carpentry and lock repairs at their workbench (198), with little girls “making beds, making fires, laying the cloth and washing up crockery, baking bread, preserving fruit, clear-starching and ironing” (199). Though Martineau seems to question religiously or biologically based arguments that women “are made for these domestic occupations” (156), she nevertheless accepts the tasks of housewifery with good humor, arguing that girls can manage the extra burdens and still keep up intellectually with their brothers.¹⁷

What Martineau does not accept, however, is the common “feminine” argument that women's proper sphere is the home, that education should train women to exert their influence within the domestic sphere so as to have it dispersed, via husbands, sons, and brothers, throughout the larger public sphere. This premise motivates More's Strictures, which begins with an “Address to women of rank and fortune, on the effects of their influence on society” (More 1:313). More emphatically denies that she is calling women to public action, “sounding an alarm to female warriors, or exciting female politicians”; rather, she wants women to exert influence “without departing from the refinement of their character, without derogating from the dignity of their rank, without blemishing the delicacy of their sex” (1:313)—without, we might translate, leaving hearth and home. The argument about feminine influence remained a tempting one in the nineteenth century. It was taken up in the United States, for instance, by Beecher, whose Treatise on Domestic Economy (1842) sets forth not only a theory of domestic management but also a theory of female education; as Jane Roland Martin has commented, the two are intertwined, since “in [this] view, female education constitutes a preparation for carrying out the domestic role.”¹⁸

For all her interest in domestic things, Martineau adopts neither More's position on feminine influence, nor Beecher's on the feminine sphere. In Society in America (1837), she had attacked American men and women for failing to fulfill the implications of the U. S. constitution by failing to give women the vote or the right to function as citizens. In Household Education Martineau more quietly, but more shrewdly, handles this question of feminine influence. Rather than locate feminine influence within the domestic sphere, she more radically locates education itself within that sphere. She denies the central importance of the public school to human learning: in chapter 5 she dismisses the boarding school as a relatively insignificant aspect of English education, it being a place “where a few years are spent by a small number of the youth of our country” (HE, 27); in contrast, she points out that important citizens—Sir Issac Newton, Elizabeth Fry, even Queen Victoria herself—were educated at home. Indeed, the premise of Household Education, in contrast to that of More's Strictures or even Wollstonecraft's “On National Education,” is that “every member of the family … must be a member of the domestic school of mutual instruction, and must know that he is so” (HE, 2). “The domestic school”—the phrase itself signals Martineau's departure from a position that equates formal schooling, whether in a public or private institution, with genuine education. As in her novel Deerbrook (1839), where the governess Maria Young complains she cannot really educate the Rowland children because the greater influence of their unfortunate home overwhelms her efforts, so in Household Education the home is the primary (and most significant) site of learning.

Having removed education from the public realm and relocated it within the domestic, Martineau undermines the authority of formal, male schooling. (She also means to undermine the authority of the upper classes, but that is another story.) This relocation makes it possible for girls and boys alike to learn, for men and women alike to teach. And, if her illustrations of learning in the early chapters feature boys and girls equally, so her illustrations of teaching throughout the volume feature mothers and fathers equally. The chapter on “Fear,” for instance, shows both mother and father teaching their children courage through story and example (HE, 57-66). Sections on book learning illustrate Martineau's principles with both mothers and fathers reading after the day's labors are finished (HE, 31-33, 165). Such examples may not have reflected real Victorian life, but they reflect what Martineau thought should be.

The title Household Education, in other words, means more than meets the eye. It refers, obviously, to the learning that can and should occur within the average English household. It takes up, too, those social and domestic habits that shape the home, that make it possible (or impossible) for members to continue to develop from infancy to old age. But it most fully means to engage what is meant by education and to inquire where education best occurs.

Whether Martineau's approach is feasible (or even desirable) is another issue: it seems clear, for example, that she underestimates the influence of the public school on the shape of English culture, and she fails to explain how women are to be transformed from their current undereducated state to their imagined position of home-educators. Despite these and other omissions, Martineau does avoid two serious problems that plague other nineteenth-century theorists of women's education. As Martin notes, Wollstonecraft's arguments for women's access to formal education address the issues of rights and citizenship, but they fail to explain how the qualities traditionally associated with the feminine sphere are to be taught and learned.¹⁹ Martineau solves this problem by embedding both “masculine” and “feminine” qualities (courage and patience, truthfulness and veneration) within the home and within the purview of all family members, male and female alike. Similarly, Martineau avoids a second problem which treatises like Beecher's create: by “professionalizing” women's role within the home and emphasizing the power of feminine influence, Beecher cuts women off from full participation in the public realm. Martineau avoids the professionalization of domestic responsibilities, assuming that tasks should be shared by family members and, more specifically, that when women pursue “professions,” they will do so, as men do, in the public realm. Household Education stands, then, at the crossroads of Victorian debates about education and gender, but Martineau is not willing to follow a single path: not willing to stay within the feminine track of Hannah More and Catharine Beecher, nor yet willing to embrace a solely masculine tradition.

Notes

1. For these articles, see The People's Journal, ed. John Saunders (London: People's Journal Office, 1846), 2:128-30, 205-7, 274-76. Fourteen other articles, later collected in Household Education, appear in vols. 2-5. With vol. 6 the magazine became The People's and Howitt's Journal, with William Howitt taking control of the editorship and Martineau ceasing to contribute.

2. See letters of 3 August 1846 and 13 November 1851, in Harriet Martineau's Letters to Fanny Wedgwood, ed. Elisabeth Sanders Arbuckle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 90-91, 119. See also R. K. Webb's discussion of the book's reception in Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (London: Heinemann, 1960), 271.

3. Vera Wheatley, The Life and Work of Harriet Martineau (Fair Lawn, N.J.: Essential Books, 1957), 276; Gillian Thomas, Harriet Martineau (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 65; Webb, 269-72.

4. In distinguishing between “feminine” and “feminist,” I follow Elaine Showalter's terminology in A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), which uses the former to designate that phase in which women imitate “the prevailing modes of the dominant tradition and internal[ize] its standards” and the latter for women's “protest against [patriarchal] standards and values, and advocacy of minority rights and values” (13).

5. Lant Carpenter, Principles of Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, 1820), 41-42.

6. Harriet Martineau, “Private: A Writer's Resolutions,” in Harriet Martineau on Women, ed. Gayle Graham Yates (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 33. Martineau wrote this resolution in June, 1829.

7. Harriet Martineau, “On Female Education,” Monthly Repository 18 (1823):77-81. For Martineau's assessment of More's religious writings, see “Female Writers on Practical Divinity,” Monthly Repository 17 (1822):593-96, 746-50.

8. The Works of Hannah More (New York: Harper, 1854), 1:364. Hereafter More, cited in the text.

9. Martineau, “On Female Education,” 80.

10. Webb, Harriet Martineau, 270-71. See also John Reed's discussion of the differences between evangelical and rationalist writings on education, in “Learning to Punish,” included in this issue of Bucknell Review.

11. Harriet Martineau, Household Education (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1849), 29. Hereafter HE, cited in the text.

12. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981) 103-7, and “Women's Brains,” in The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1980), 152-59; the quotation from Broca appears on 154.

13. There may be more examples using “a young girl” because of the high proportion of autobiographical anecdotes; however, where Martineau does not record personal experience, she consistently balances references to the two sexes.

14. On Beecher's A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1842; reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 1977), see Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 103-38.

15. Showalter's phrase, n. 4. Showalter dates the “feminist” phase in English literature from 1880 to 1920, but I would include Martineau's work in Household Education as a pioneering example of that phase. Martineau anticipates what will later become a common protest against women's exclusion from “male” education.

16. See Mary Wollstonecraft, “On National Education,” in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: Norton, 1988), 157-78. Though they take up similar positions on education, Martineau had little use for Wollstonecraft, calling her “a poor victim of passion, with no control over her own peace, and no calmness or content except when the needs of her individual nature were satisfied.” Martineau disliked such proponents of women's rights, in that “their advocacy of Woman's cause becomes mere detriment, precisely in proportion to their personal reasons for unhappiness.” In Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (1877; reprint, London: Virago, 1983), 1:400.

17. For such acquiescence in matters of housewifery, Deirdre David interprets Martineau's “attitude towards male cultural and social authority” as “undeniably ambiguous.” See her Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 54-58. My interpretation of Martineau's acceptance of domestic duties would locate the ambiguity in two sometimes conflicting impulses of feminism: the impulse to attest the value of roles and duties that women have traditionally borne vs. the need to assert the rights of women to privileges and responsibilities that men claim.

18. Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation, 109. Though it is not certain that Martineau knew the Treatise on Domestic Economy, Martineau had met Catharine Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Cincinnati in 1835 during her tour of America; in Household Education she was probably responding to what she felt was a mistaken direction in American feminist thought. For Martineau's relations with American feminists, see Yates, ed., Harriet Martineau on Women, 127-60.

19. Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation, 91-102.